Pre-order ‘Northgard’ for iOS
Shiro Games’ immensely popular Northgard is a real-time Viking strategy game that’s been around since early 2017, first releasing on Steam and gradually making its way across the console landscape. And now, it’s about to make its way to iPad and iPhone.
With lore steeped in Norse mythology, Northgard tasks you with controlling one of several Viking clans as they build and grow a settlement on a newly discovered continent.
In true RTS style, you’ll be assigning jobs to villagers, harvesting and carefully managing resources, exploring surrounding territories, starting up trade routes, and of course, strategically battling foes and hostile creatures (many of which are of a mystical nature: dire wolves, undead warriors, giants, dragons…that sort of thing).
As far as RTS games go, this one’s pretty laid-back, with an easygoing pace that you can dedicate maybe an hour or two per session and never feel overwhelmed. If anything, hardcore strategy people might feel it’s too slow:
Despite all the good in Northgard, there is one thing that frustrates me enough to be discouraged from playing—the game’s incredibly slow pace cannot be sped up by any means. It can take forever for your units to complete autonomous actions such as building, exploring, and gathering materials, and a fairly simple mission in the story campaign can take upwards of an hour because of it. It’s fair for the base speed of the game to be on the slow side because you’ll be juggling and keeping track of a lot of different things in the late game, but with no option to speed up the action whatsoever it can be agonizing to get that far into a game. While searching online to find if any speed settings existed, I saw one fan of the game say that it was the only real-time strategy game where they had time to fold their laundry in between actions, and I cannot think of a better way to describe the pace than that.
Northgard is expected to release on April 13th, 2021, and you can pre-order it for $8 now. (The Nintendo Switch version is still going for $35, so the App Store price is an absolute steal.)